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Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 03:07:56 +0000
From: Marcus Reid <marcus@blazingdot.com>
To: Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com>
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Cc: FreeBSD Stable <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org>, peter h <peter@hk.ipsec.se>,
	Jeremy Chadwick <freebsd@jdc.parodius.com>
Subject: Re: about thumper aka sun fire x4500
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On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 03:12:19PM -0800, Chuck Swiger wrote:
> On Jan 17, 2012, at 2:09 PM, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> > I do not have one of these boxes / am not familiar with them, but
> > HyperTransport is an AMD thing.  The concept is that it's a bus that
> > interconnects different pieces of a system to the CPU (and thus the
> > memory bus).  
> 
> While that was a nice picture, it's not related to the bus
> architecture of a Sun 4500. :-)
> 
> An X or E 4500 is a highly fault-tolerant parallel minicomputer with 8
> slots-- one was I/O, and you could put up to 7 CPU boards with dual
> UltraSPARC processors-- you could hot-plug CPU boards and memory in
> the event of a failure and keep the rest of the system up.  They cost
> a significant fraction of a million dollars circa y2k.

You're thinking E4500, which is as you describe.  The X4500 is described
here:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Fire_X4500

Marcus